The UFC’s Knockout Content-Marketing Punch

The year was 1993. I was sitting in my middle-school homeroom class when a friend revealed that he had brought in a VHS of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). We had watched plenty of martial arts movies—my favorite being Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Bloodsport—in which martial artists of various disciplines from around the world gathered in one place to find out which martial art was supreme. Finally, someone wanted to play this story out in real life. I borrowed the tape and watched it when I got home. I was captivated.